SAT: A Web-Based Interactive Advisor for Investor-Ready Business Plans

The business plan is one of the essential tools for companies to attract investors and raise venture capital. Getting a business plan "investor ready" in that context means that it has to be professionally prepared such that it answers all questions of potential investors. This, however, requires in-depth knowledge of a typical investor's expectations and viewpoints, a type of knowledge which in particular first-time entrepreneurs or small companies do not dispose of. As a consequence, significant amounts of consulting hours are required to get the business plan ready to be presented to investors. The goal of the SAT project presented in this paper is to provide an in-depth business plan advisory service over the Web. While current approaches in that area rely on static fill-out forms or checklists, the SAT tool is based on personalized interactive dialogs, knowledge-based input analysis and feedback generation, as well as on detailed financial calculations. Within the paper, we thus show how knowledge-based approaches can serve as a technological foundation for such next-generation electronic services and how the corresponding development and maintenance efforts can be minimized. The paper gives an overview on the general knowledge-based architecture of the system, discusses the integrated graphical modelling environment, and finally reports on experiences gained from the practical use of the tool.